The Judge
RAVES!
Date: 11/11/14
Jacques Brel - "Le Moribond"
It's ever my cute way, mes petites housses de couette, to try to provide an opening into wider cultural experiences than those to be found in our standard-issue, insular, provincial popular 'culture'. I hope to enlighten you again today.
Many of you will be familiar with a quite appalling song called Seasons In The Sun. I wish I could say the contrary. Unfortunately, it was a huge hit when I was eleven years old, staying at the top of the charts for a full month in the spring of 1974, and therefore achieving that sort of ubiquity which engenders a desire for bloody vengeance on its perpetrators.
(The nearest we got to subverting it was to sing its chorus as, "We had joy, we had fun / We had pimples on the bum...", but I digress).
It's a thoroughly doomy song, sung as it is by someone who is dying whose confessional utterances could only be described as 'cloying' if you added an awful lot of water to them first.
It would be easy to blame the performer - at least of the version I've referred to above - for the overwrought nature of the whole wretched (should there be a 'w' in that? I'm not so sure, given the reaction it causes in at least one listener) farrago. But the singer can only seek to do justice to the material given to him (should it deserve justice, of course), and the singer on this occasion - the Canadian Terry Jacks - at least had the decency to disown it later, if only because it marked him down as no more than a retailer of gloomy ditties rather than the purveyor of post-hippy singer-songwriting shtick which he had been up to that point.
The real person to blame for this example of morbid schlock-horror isn't the composer of the song itself (of whom more anon), but the lyricist. Back in the mid-sixties, the American proto-hippy and soi-disant poet Rod McKuen had had the idea of putting English lyrics to the songs of the Belgian troubadour Jacques Brel. Unfortunately in the case of one of Brel's songs, Le Moribond, McKuen managed spectacularly to miss the point of Brel's original lyrics, creating instead the sort of saccharine, sentimental gush which the great American public - who seemed long ago to have abandoned reason and depth in favour of down-home whimsy - would lap up.
It took a bit of time, but in 1974 he struck gold (or rather, golden syrup) thanks to Jacks. Jacks (or more likely his record company) then compounded this offence of causing mental caries by releasing a follow-up, If You Go Away, which was another of McKuen's creative murderings of Brel. Jacks went on to retire from music to live a redeeming life making pro-environmental videos. McKuen, sadly, just went on. And on.
So, what was McKuen not so much translating as traducing, then? Well, you can see and hear for yourself below. Yes, Le Moribond is sung by a man who is dying; but the sentiments he expresses - and, crucially, the way he expresses them - are kilometres apart from the tooth-rot McKuen and Jacks turned it into. In fact, they are the opposite of sentimental.
In short, it's a humorous song, albeit with a bleak and sardonic humour, but is all the more pleasing for that.
(Incidentally, if you want to see what can be done when Brel's songs are treated with the proper regard for their origins, go here.)
Here we see one of the late twentieth century's greater songwriters in his element, delivering his own material with verve and panache. I hope this will help replace its tawdry Anglo imitation in your minds' ears.
